The New World was a huge place and exactly where the first landing happens could have made a huge difference in what came next…

What actually happened: Columbus actually landed among one of the vulnerable people of the New World. The Taino of the large islands of the West Indies had large populations, not much of a military tradition, and were for the most part armed only with spears and spear throwers rather than with bows and arrows.

What might have happened: Given the navigation techniques of the time and Columbus’s limited idea of where he was going, he could easily have ended up hundreds of miles north or south of where he did. What if Columbus had discovered northern Florida rather than the West Indies?

Let’s say he heads north and explores the coast until he finds a good harbor, possibly in northern Florida, or more likely further north along the coast of Georgia or South Carolina. He leaves the crew of a floundered ship among friendly natives, and then goes back to organize a second expedition.

The second expedition plants a colony in what is now Georgia. That colony disintegrates into civil war and starvation as the Indians turn hostile due to Spanish mistreatment. Of over a thousand colonists, only about three hundred are still alive in the main colony by the time the next fleet arrives. A few hundred others are living as rebels in various enclaves up and down the coast.

The Spanish do manage to do some exploration up and down the coast before things turn bad enough to place the survival of the colony in jeopardy.

Columbus has by now proven himself incompetent as an administrator. He is deposed as governor and sent home in disgrace.

The Spanish crown is no sure what to make of their new colony. It doesn’t seem particularly worthwhile, but it may be a stepping stone to the riches of the Indies. The Spanish visualize Florida as a being a large island somewhere between Spain and the coast of Japan—kind of a larger version of the Canary Islands.

The Spanish crown sees two uses for this newly discovered ‘island’. First, it can be subdued and exploited, just as the Canary Islands have been. Second, it can be used as a base for exploration and eventually trade with the Indies.

At the same time, the Spanish crown doesn’t have unlimited resources, and the ‘treasures’ of the new discoveries have turned out to be of very limited value.

Most of the wealthy or noble colonists that were lured to the colony in the first excitement of discovery have left. There really isn’t much to exploit anywhere close to the colony. The local Indians die quickly if they are enslaved and sent to the slave markets of Europe. They run away or die from European diseases if the colonists try to make them work around the colony. By 1500, the Indian population within forty miles in any direction of the colony has for the most part vanished. They have either died or fled further inland.

There is no gold or silver anywhere near the colony. Some colonists make a meager living as ranchers, importing African slaves to labor on the ranches in place of the dwindling Indians. Spanish slave raiders go further inland, raiding the surviving Mississippian centers in the interior. That’s a risky business, because the Indians of Southeastern North America are by no means pushovers militarily. Several small parties of Spanish slavers die in well-planned ambushes as the Indians find ways of dealing with Spaniards, at least in small groups.

The Spanish crown hasn’t totally lost interest in their new discovery, but they have to deal with the usual list of problems in Europe, and they see no compelling reason to put a great deal of effort into exploring and settling the new discovery. They are interested in finding a way around it and on to Japan, and also in keeping European rivals from setting up bases there.

Other European countries have already been exploring around the fringes of the New World. Portugal has discovered Brazil and fishermen from various countries have discovered the great amounts of fish near Newfoundland.

The French and English have both explored parts of the North American coast north of what is now Virginia. Explorers and slave raiders from various countries visit many parts of the coast of the New World over the next twenty years, often without leaving written records of their comings and goings. Indians get somewhat more sophisticated in their dealing with the outsiders, and Europeans gradually start to sort out the geography of the New World they have discovered.

That New World is a wild and wide open place, with many of the Europeans that visit there respecting no laws, stealing from the Indians, kidnapping them, or killing them simply because they have the power to do so. A group of Spanish sailors discover the Tiano of what is now Haiti in 1504 and go on a several-month-long rampage, killing thousands of Indians and taking several hundred back to the slave-markets of Europe. Stories about European mistreatment spread through Eastern North America and the West Indies, and increasingly European explorers are greeted by empty villages or showers of arrows.

The real value of the New World seems to be in its fisheries, and the Spanish crown devotes much of its energies to trying to control those fisheries over the next couple of decades.

Around 1504, French explorers find the small gold deposits of the West Indies that Columbus would have found had he gone further south, and rival French and Spanish colonies are soon fighting over those deposits and supplies of Tiano slaves to work them.

The discovery of gold in the West Indies spells the end of the Spanish colony in northern Florida as a viable entity, as most of its members give up their ranches and head to the West Indies. A few die-hards struggle on, but African slaves have introduced malaria to the area and it becomes increasingly unhealthy for Europeans. The area gradually falls by default into the hands of mixed race groups consisting of descendants of escaped or abandoned slaves, descendants of the few surviving Indians, and children that Spanish colonists have fathered with Indian or African women and then abandoned.

What happens next? Well eventually someone will stumble across the rich and populous civilizations of Mexico or Peru. In our timeline that happened for Mexico in 1517. In this time-line it would probably happen sooner because of competition between the explorers of various nations.

What happens then? Three or four cornered wars between various European powers and the Aztecs? A prolonged period of trading with no one European power capable of taking over the Aztec Empire while other Europeans are available for the Aztecs to play off against them? How does the abortive Spanish colony in North America play out? How fast do crops, diseases and domestic animals from it spread to other parts of North America? How does that affect the Indians of North America and how they deal with European settlers? I may explore that in more depth in future issues.